Our breakfast discussion events offer a relaxed start to the day with a group of poets and other festival participants exploring this year’s festival themes over coffee and pastries.

To (mis)quote Bertolt Brecht, we live in challenging times. Our world is changing around us, with climate change and political upheaval threatening the future we’d expected – Brexit, right-wing extremism, global warming. Poetry cannot exist in a vacuum and inevitably engages with contemporary issues, but can it be political while still retaining artistic integrity? As part of this year’s festival theme of Another Place, our Friday panel discussion takes place in partnership with Magma Poetry’s climate change issue. One of the issue's editors, Fiona Moore, will chair a discussion on what makes a good climate change or political poem. How to write about something too large for any human brain to encompass? Can poetry help us to imagine our ways towards creative and constructive approaches to tackling issues?

Fiona Moore is guest chair for this panel discussion. She will be joined by poets Alice Tarbuck, Polly Atkin, Jon Plunkett and Harry Giles.